


Worst Case Scenario

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 20:31:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9921110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: Playing with fictions is playing with fire





	

The cell was five and three quarter single paces long.

This gave Blake options. He could either stop at five, pivoting on a different foot- left for the end near the door, right for the far end under the high barred window- or he could restrict the length of his paces enough to fit in six paces. 

He experimented with both. Neither was satisfactory. He much preferred to turn on his left foot each time, but restricting his stride was frustrating. He ended up walking just four steps to each length, the extra space wasted.

Blake spent a lot of time in the first couple of days being frustrated about the length of the cell. He was well aware that he had much, much bigger problems, but this one was immediate and annoying and he cursed the missing few inches as he stamped across the concrete floor, one, two, three, four and turn, one, two, three, four and turn.

It would have been better if he could have walked round, rather than just up and down, but the room was narrow and the mattress on the floor blocked one side. He would have moved the mattress but it was currently occupied by an unconscious Kerr Avon. Blake had of course done what he could to establish the extent of Avon’s injuries (he thought the man has been hit in the head but nothing obviously showed) and to treat them (absolutely nothing) and now he paced. He did every so often think about dragging both mattress and its contents in the middle of the room so that he could walk round them, but for all he knew the slightest jarring could make Avon worse, so he didn't. 

There had been water to start with, now nearly gone. Blake had saved the last half litre or so for when Avon woke. He tried not to look at it as he paced. He would get less thirsty if he reduced his energy consumption but after two days of intermittent walking he couldn’t face the idea of just sitting still. The other bucket, the one that had started off empty, stank to high heaven. No-one had unlocked the door or answered his shouts since he woke up in here. 

He walked until he was interrupted by a faint voice.

“We lost, then.” 

“Oh yes,” Blake dropped to his knees next to the mattress, a wave of relief thrumming though him. “How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts.” Avon said. “In the circumstances I doubt that’s going to be what kills me. What happened?”

Blake brought over the water. “Drink first, and we’ll get you sitting up. There’s no hurry to swap war stories. We aren’t going anywhere.” The brief frisson of relief had evaporated with the inevitable reminder that they were both in serious trouble. 

Avon looked little better when he was propped against the wall and had sipped some of the water. Blake wet his own mouth with a tiny amount. Avon had been unconscious for at least two days- he was likely to need the rest. It would run out for both of them of course if that door stayed shut.

“How much do you remember?” Blake said, finally.

Avon brought a hand up to his temple, frowning. “I was leading the fleet in past Saturn as arranged. We were intercepted. I don’t remember any of the fight, though. I told you that you should have stayed on board. Clearly whatever my strategy was, it failed.”

“It wasn’t your strategy that failed,” Blake said. “It was the whole uprising. It didn’t happen, Avon. The people demonstrating on the streets took a look at the armed troopers and went quietly back to work, the Federation took back control of the rebel agencies, the promised statements of support from the judiciary didn’t materialise, the sabotage of the Fed fleet was a damp squib and when it arrived at almost full strength most of the rebel ships behind you got cold feet and took off. As you’re here, I presume Liberator is lost.” It made a longish summary of their woes but he’d had a long time to rehearse it. 

Avon grimaced. “I always suspected that a lot of those ships talked a better revolution than they fought. Is everyone else dead, then?”

“I’ve no idea,” Blake had started pacing again. “I know lots of people died.” He remembered the guns firing and the blood but the individual faces of the men and women dying around him were lost in a haze of horror. “ We tried to defend the Earthside base but there weren’t anything like enough of us. We needed the general Domes uprisings to back up everything else that we’d planned, and we didn’t get them. I failed, Avon, and everything’s gone.”

Since Avon must have been captured with Liberator out by Saturn while Blake had been overrun by troopers on Earth, they were surely not sharing a cell for administrative convenience. Presumably they were supposed to indulge in mutual despair on discovering that the other had been captured. Blake was finding it difficult not to play his part as cast. Everything had been lost, including Liberator and her crew as well as all the rebels that they’d been working with for months now. Failure had always been a possibility but never failure on this scale. Not without even a real fight in the end.

Avon shrugged a little, and winced. “They all swore blind that they’d fight to the death for their freedom. It seems that your main mistake was to believe them.” 

“Without a popular uprising how were we ever going to win?” Blake had been pacing for two days, thinking about this. 

“Maybe there never was a way. Do you think you could help me over to that bucket?”

They passed a few more odorous, hungry and in Blake’s case thirsty hours. He was already regretting not saving more of the water for Avon, who was still white and staggering on his arm on the rare occasion when he needed to get to his feet. 

Eventually Blake was too tired to pace any more. He laid down awkwardly on the concrete and closed his eyes as he did earlier for a while while Avon was still unconscious, but this time Avon grumbled at him in a faltering voice and squeezed up to make a little room. Despite the fact that even pressed up against each other there was still barely space for his shoulder and hip on the thin mattress and his limbs could only sprawl out across the cold floor, he fell asleep almost instantly.

Avon shook him awake again from where he’d fallen off the mattress. “Blake. Blake! The door’s open!”

He was on his feet instantly, adrenaline fuelled. The door was open, daylight beyond. Blake crossed the three paces and crouched to look both ways. 

“Empty,” he said. "Who opened it? Did you see?”

“No. I was asleep too. We should have set a watch.” Avon sounded slightly put out at the oversight. 

“They probably waited until we we both asleep.” Blake looked out again. The corridor was about thirty feet long with to a junction in one direction and a dead end at the other with half a dozen doors off. The light came from a transparent strip along the ceiling. with a dull sky beyond. He went back to help Avon to his feet.

“We need weapons and we need allies. See of you can get any of those doors open. I’ll check no-one’s coming this way.”

This part of whatever complex they were in seemed to be deserted. Most of the doors were locked mechanically; Avon shook his head when Blake suggested breaking in. “I’ve got no tools at all, not even a pick. Vila might...”

He didn't finish the sentence. Vila had been on Liberator. 

The last door opened to something more like a military ready room than a cell. The weapon racks were empty but one gun appeared to have got kicked under a table and overlooked at some point. Blake retrieved it and confirmed that it appeared to work. There was also, to Blake’s huge relief, a half full water cooler. They searched for keys, tools, food, anything else useful but there was nothing but some uniforms. 

“Shall we take those?” Avon asked. His familiar black leather was looking distinctly battered. 

Blake thought about it for a moment, watching Avon’s shaking hand pull out a dark jacket. “Where do you think the troopers have gone?”

“You think there’s fighting still going on?” Avon dropped the uniform. “I suppose it wouldn’t do to be shot by our own side, if we still have one.”

Something about that last parenthetical phrase hit Blake somewhere around his complaining stomach and he sat down suddenly. Fortunately there’s a chair behind him. “Avon. I’m sorry. 

He'd thought that in the long wait for Avon to wake or die he'd comes to terms with what losing meant. Blake realised now that he hadn't. They were going to walk, or in Avon's case stagger, out of here with one gun between them into a world in which everyone Blake knew, everyone he'd worked with, everyone he'd had hope in was dead, and then they would die. Avon would die. Avon, who had never been a revolutionary, never wanted to change the world, only to live in it a little more luxuriously. 

"I'm sorry," he said again, hopelessly. 

"For what? "

"I dragged you into this. I could at least have kept you alive."

"Rather to my surprise I am alive," Avon said dryly. "Currently at least. What are you sitting down for?" 

For despair and anguish, Blake didn't say. He heaved himself to his feet again. "Do you want to take the gun?"

"I've been seeing double since I woke up," Avon said. "I can spot twice as many troopers as you but I wouldn't know which one to aim at. You'd better keep it." 

It had been too much to hope for that a head injury that kept him under for two days wouldn't have caused some lingering damage. Blake added it to his list of worries. "Any other symptoms?" 

"Just the headache for now. " Avon paused for a second, looking even more than usually put out, then turned his head away from Blake to throw up the water he'd just drunk on the tiled floor. "And that."

Running around with untreated concussion could kill but they couldn't wait around here for Avon to recover either. “We’ll go slowly. Lean on my am.”

The junction turned into a short passage and a solid door. Blake put his shoulder against it and it swung inwards reluctantly, as if it were usually powered.

On the other side was a wide room with clear glass to three sides. Outside a deserted landing strip was framed by a rocky shoreline and a sea that stretched unbroken to a hundred and eighty degree horizon. They were either on an island or a promontory. Inside a row of desks held computer units. A second door off to the far side of the back of the room was wedged open with a broken terminal. All the equipment was dark and silent.

Avon stumbled against a desk as they entered. Blake studied him with increasing concern. “Sit down here and wait. I’m just going to check the other corridor.” The feel of the place was deserted but he needed to be sure. He settled Avon in a chair and went hunting.

Two dormitories, an empty galley and a bathroom that way. The place was equipped for about ten people but no-one was around. A door to the back of the complex opened onto refuse tips, thick pathless jungle, and what had been the building’s power unit until someone had apparently taken a sledgehammer to it. The air, light and gravity outside felt like Earth, but nowhere on Earth that Blake had ever seen. 

As he came back inside to search the rooms more thoroughly a sudden noise in the second dorm had him swinging the gun round but the crackle was just an untuned hand held receiver. Blake brought it back to the control room, where Avon appeared to have fallen asleep. Leaving the man to rest a while, he fiddled with the receiver, finally coaxing a distorted but intelligible voice out of it.

_...was President Servalan speaking from the new Federation flagship_ Will of the People _. Telecasters have confirmed that yesterday’s execution of two thousand, four hundred and eighty one rebels, including the remaining criminals from Roj Blake’s terrorist cell, was the largest ever telecast audience for a live event, reaching ninety two percent of the available audience on Earth._

“Turn it off,” Avon said from behind him.

“We need to know what’s happening,” Blake insisted. 

“It’s propaganda not data. What were you planning anyway, a rescue attempt?” 

The voice was still talking about record audience figures. Avon looked severely pained either by the noise or the contents. Blake reluctantly turned it off for the moment. 

“There’s no obvious way out,” he said. “Everyone’s left the base and there’s no transport. The power unit’s been destroyed so we can’t call anyone. We’ll have to wait here to see if someone remembers us or hack our way through the jungle on foot.”

He opened the glass doors to the landing strip and walked out, looking up and around. The only sound was the calls of birds and animals in the jungle behind the base. The sky was uniformly overcast with white cloud and the air was hot and humid. They could be a mile from civilisation or a thousand. 

The fight was over. It was not the sort of thing that you get a second chance about. Ask all the dead. If Earth was finally going to rebel against its masters, as surely, surely it must one day, it wouldn’t be him leading the way. 

He walked back to Avon, frowning at the man’s unfocussed gaze. “I need to get you to somewhere with medical facilities. After that we’ll have to go into hiding. There must be someone left who can offer us sanctuary. There are plenty of frontier planets with poor personnel records.”

“Just stay here.” Avon’s voice was noticeably slurring now. 

Blake felt a flicker of relief at the idea of turning his back on the whole disaster. There was no-one waiting for them any more. If they were going to spend the rest of their lives in obscurity hiding from Servalan it might as well be on Earth. He and Avon could manage here, together. Concussion got better on its own, he was sure, with rest. “All right. I’m going to get you to a bed first. You look...”

He hesitated on the word ‘dreadful’. Avon now seemed to be looking somewhere above his shoulder. “Can you see?”

“No.” Avon lurched forward from the chair and Blake dropped to his knees to catch the heavy body as he fell. 

“Avon! What can I do?” 

“Nothing.” Avon's unfocused eyes had closed. “Nothing left. Might kill me after all.” 

Blake could feel the man convulsing now, over and over, relentless. "Avon!" Desperation cracked his voice. "Don't leave me here alone."

"Said I'd leave," Avon muttered. There was a pause, during which Blake held him closer, rocking slightly, as if it might make any difference now. 

Avon opened his mouth as if to speak again but severe convulsions took him for several seconds. By the time his body had stilled again he had stopped breathing.

Blake had no idea afterwards of how long he had struggled with the half remembered CPR. When he finally stopped Avon's lips against his were already cold. He sat back against the console desk, his mind blank. Very carefully he disengaged one hand from the still body and reached out for the dropped gun, turning it towards his own temple.

“Don’t do that!”

The voice was entirely familiar. Blake automatically spun the gun outwards again, at the figure standing just a yard or so away from him (how had be got so close without being seen?). Too late he thought, with searing anguish. You're too late.

“He’s dead, Tarrant.”

“You look terrible,” Tarrant said. He himself looked just as Blake had remembered him, though Blake recalled clearly the report he’d had that Tarrant’s commandos had been wiped out to the last man. “This isn’t research, it’s obsession. I’m going to break that machine myself when we get back. Give me the gun before you do something stupid.” 

“Not a chance.” Blake’s hand was steady. There had been too many betrayals already. “Where did you come from, Tarrant?”

“The same place that you did.” He pulled something out from a pocket and Blake jerked the gun in warning but it was only a small skin patch. “Stick this on the back of his hand.”

“He’s dead.”

“No he isn’t. Do you want to do it, or shall I?”

Blake did nothing so Tarrant stepped forward, avoiding the gun barrel, and slapped the patch on the limp hand. 

Blake supposed it could do no harm, not now. “Where’s your ship? I presume you have a ship.”

“Not exactly. We’d better wait for Avon to come round.”

He’s dead, Blake was about to say again, when Avon stirred against his stomach. Blake looked down in astonishment and Tarrant kicked the gun out of his hand, diving to retrieve it from the ground before Blake could react. 

“Traitor!” he hissed. He’d never really trusted Del Tarrant. Avon had always seemed to, but Avon was dead. Was not dead. For a moment he was truly confused.

“Don’t worry about it.” Tarrant shoved the gun into his waistband. “None of this is real.”

Blake wasn’t falling for that one. He knew reality when he saw it. “Give me my gun back.” Avon was twitching now but Blake couldn’t spare a glance down to check on him, not with Tarrant armed and treacherous.

Tarrant sighed. “Orac!” he said aloud. “Pink elephant please.” 

From the just visible edge of the jungle there was a rustle as a huge lurid pink animal pushed its way out of the leafy foliage and began to amble across the landing bay. 

“Would you like me to make it dance? Or serve cocktails?”

“The only thing I would like to see right now is your ship, Tarrant,” Blake snarled. 

“Orac, ship.” Tarrant said. He gestured out to sea, where a five masted ship under full sail flying a huge black and white flag decorated with a skull and crossbones had just come over the horizon. “We can do this for as long as you like. This is a simulation, Blake.” 

Avon was slowly pulling himself upwards with an arm around Blake’s neck. “It does look that way. I would like a rather stiff drink at this point.”

The elephant stomped across towards them, a silver tray balanced on its trunk. Blake regarded the glass in front of him with deep suspicion. “Clearly I’ve been drugged already.”

“You always have to be pig headed about this bit,” Tarrant grumbled. “If this was an intelligence test Avon would will hands down. Tell him, Avon, or we’ll never get out of here.”

“It’s either a simulation or a miracle, Blake,” Avon had reached out for a crystal glass already. “And I don’t believe in miracles. We’re in a simulation, though God knows how or why.”

“Because you two are idiots,” Tarrant said cheerfully. “You’ll get your suppressed memories back as soon as we return. You’ll find all your answers there. Blake, if you could at least accept the possibility that this is not real, we can pull you out without risking serious trauma. What have you got to lose?”

Blake stole a glance sideways to find that there was colour in Avon’s cheeks now and the drink was already finished, although he’d made no attempt to disentangle himself from Blake.

“Are you claiming not to be real then?” Blake demanded of Tarrant.

“I'm as real as you two. I’m using the third interface unit. Orac can’t simulate live people convincingly for toffee. That’s why you had to make this place deserted.” 

The ship was now a great deal closer, though it didn’t seem to be going at any speed. Through the open windows Blake could hear the men on board singing shanties, waving scimitars and firing cannon into the sea. He squinted at them. They did seem to move with remarkable uniformity. Somebody walked along a plank and fell into the water to the accompaniment of a great roar of approval from the sailors. A huge green bird, at least quarter the size of the elephant, flew across the water and into the control room, where it perched in outright defiance of gravity on the back of one of the smaller chairs and squawked “Pieces of eight!” at Blake repeatedly. 

“I think Orac is getting impatient,” Tarrant said. “You need to tell it to disengage the program.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Because if I pull you out while you still think this is real quite bad things can happen. Trust me, we’ve done all this before. Just tell Orac to disengage.” 

Drugs seemed a much more plausible explanation. Blake reached out to touch Avon’s hand, warm now. If this was real, Avon was alive. If it wasn’t... “So outside this supposed simulation did the revolution really fail?”

“It hasn’t started yet.”

“And we’re on Liberator?”

“Liberator?” Tarrant looked surprised. “Liberator was destroyed ages ago. We’re on Scorpio.” He looked suddenly contrite. “Damn. I shouldn’t have said any of that. Don’t try to remember; it will conflict with the scenario memories. It will all sort itself out when we get out of here.” 

“Never mind that. Wherever we are, we’re all there and we’re all alive and well?” Avon said

“Yes.” 

“Well, this place is getting less appealing all the time.” The parrot and elephant had just defecated noisily in unison, creating a large slimy white mess and a steaming pile of dung on the floor. “Shall we try going somewhere else? Blake?” His fingers closed around Blake’s briefly, then he let go.

“All right,” Blake said. He didn’t know what was true but he might as well trust Avon. “Orac, disengage program.”

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Avon walked up and down a couple more times, stopped at a console, typed a couple of numbers into it and walked away again without looking at the result.

“Why am I here?” he said aloud to the empty room. 

Orac buzzed. “The causal nature of reality means that there are a semi-infinite number of answers to that question. Please be more specific.”

“I wasn't talking to you.” Avon took another couple of turns around Scorpio's empty consoles. “All right then. Tell me. Why am I up here alone when by all logic and common sense I was the only possible choice to send down to negotiate with the council of warlords whom I have already met about the antidote that I have personally significantly improved?”

“There are still seventy two possible answers to that question,” Orac said. 

“Well then, filter them by significance and explanatory power and give me the top one! Do I have to do all your thinking for you?” 

“You would be utterly incapable of matching my intellectual power,” Orac said. “The answer to your question that meets your criteria best is that you are here because Roj Blake ordered you to stay here.”

“I know that much,” Avon snapped. “Give me the most relevant answer that I don't already know.”

“I dislike second guessing human states of knowledge,” Orac droned. “Thinking down to your level requires the unpleasant imposition of additional resistance to the flow of data in my circuits. Roj Blake's reasons for ordering you to remain on Scorpio are illogical and emotion driven. Your failure to understand them indicates a very low level of the particularly irrational thinking style called empathy that humans incorrectly flatter themselves is a virtue. Congratulations. I am now going to return to my work." The hum clicked off. 

Avon considered demanding a proper answer from Orac but he was fairly sure that he'd get nothing more than a stream of further insults. The machine had at least confirmed what he already suspected; Blake's reasons were not the rather pathetically argued ones that the man had presented when Avon had challenged his orders. 

The last time Avon had been off Scorpio was to supervise the packing away of the alien simulator on the abandoned asteroid that they were using as off-ship storage, and that had been four weeks ago. As a general rule he was perfectly content to stay on Scorpio and let the young and trigger-happy run around on planets getting themselves shot at, but as he stood at the controls and watched Blake and the others disappear from the teleport bay time and time again he had been starting to feel distinctly redundant. 

Not entirely redundant. That might at least have been relaxing, Instead Blake seemed to have decided that Avon was a full time ship’s technician. “Talk to Orac about tracking the latest Pylene-50 production, will you, Avon?” Blake would say over breakfast. “And can you do something about that hiccup in Slave’s short range scanning system? Oh, and the aft hold door is sticking again.” Then he and half the rest of the crew would disappear yet again, leaving Avon with a list of utterly tedious ship based jobs, many of which could have been done quite adequately, if not as well, by any of the others. 

It had come to a head with this latest matter however. Avon and Orac had been working for some time on improving the Pylene-50 antidote, while he and Blake had been negotiating for a new conference with the warlords who might be able to produce it on an industrial scale and whose alliance had fallen apart after the treachery of Zukan. Today’s meeting was no more than a preliminary, but Avon had assumed as a matter of course that he would lead it. 

“I’ll go,” Blake had said that morning, to his surprise. “I need to take stock of these people if we’re going to be working closely with them, and they need to do the same with me.”

Avon had repressed slight annoyance. Blake did have this habit of taking over everything. “Very well. Once I’ve introduced you to them I’ll brief them on the drug and you can do the politicking,”

“You’ll need to stay on Scorpio,” Blake had said, a slight frown creasing his forehead. “If they have questions about the antidote, we’ll need Orac online to answer them. I’m not taking it down there, obviously.” 

Avon had stared at him in disbelief. “This is my work, Blake. I don’t need Orac to answer any questions that a bunch of untutored mercenaries will come up with. I’ve met these people. You haven’t. Of course I’m going.” 

“No, you aren’t.” Blake had said. “I’m quite capable of introducing myself without your renowned diplomatic skills. We’ve done all the groundwork we need to on this one. Now I want you on the ship so that Scorpio’s secure and Orac’s available.”

Avon had, quite patiently in the circumstances, explained to Blake that any of the others could sit next to Orac and convey messages if necessary. This had been his deal in the first place and it was ludicrous to try to cut him out of it now. Blake had insisted that he was not being cut out of anywhere- he was where Blake felt he was going to be most useful. The discussion was closed, in any event; his decision had been made. 

Avon had been very close to telling Blake what he could do with his damn decision. It was only the suspicion that everyone else on the flight deck was waiting for him to do just that which restrained him. He pointedly hadn’t spoken directly to Blake for some time afterwards, but if this worried his glorious leader Blake wasn’t letting it show. In the end to add insult to injury everyone except Avon had gone, leaving him on a deserted Scorpio with the teleport controls, an obnoxious computer and a list of things to fix that he didn’t feel in the slightest inclined to look at. 

Illogical and emotion driven, Orac had said of Blake’s decision to leave him up here. It was certainly illogical, but that didn’t explain anything. Emotion driven was more informative. Was Blake concerned about Avon as a rival? That made little logical sense- one reason, among others, that Avon had come to find Blake was that he was utterly tired of trying to lead. While he hadn’t always given Blake an easy ride over the more stupid of his decisions, Avon hadn’t since tried to usurp his position in the slightest. Still, Orac had said Blake was being illogical, and insecurity about his leadership role would definitely count as an emotional driver. 

He would have to have the matter out with Blake in private on his return. It was ridiculous to be sidelined by Blake’s over-vivid imagination. After all if Avon had wanted to take back leadership of Scorpio he would have done so by now, not skulked around dutifully fiddling with Slave and fixing doors when told to.

 

Apparently nobody needed to interrogate Orac. Soolin checked in with the ship as arranged every thirty minutes but had no more to say than that the meeting seemed to be going well. Avon kicked his heels around the ship for three hours until he received the signal to teleport the crew up again. 

He could tell that it had been a success because Blake's eyes were shining. "Good work, Avon, " the man said as soon as he stepped off the teleporter. "They all seem to remember you with a fair bit of enthusiasm, despite the way the last conference ended and the presentation on the antidote went down well. We should have a full conference on our hands in no more than a couple of weeks. Meanwhile they'll be sending over the first details of the available manufacturing plants for you to look over."

Avon wondered if he was supposed to thank Blake for the pat on the head or the forthcoming extra work on Blake’s behalf. The man could wait until hell froze over for either. “Are my babysitting duties over for now?”

“What? Oh, Orac. Yes, thanks.”

“Good.” He strode off towards his quarters before Blake could start asking him about the door repair. He couldn’t see any particular benefit to be gained from losing his temper at this point. 

 

Blake opened the door to his cabin on the second knock. “Avon? Is something wrong?”

“I’d like to talk to you,” Avon said. “Invite me in please.” 

“All right.” Blake stepped back so that Avon could enter. Scorpio’s cabins were tiny. When the ship was rebuilt and refitted, Blake had resisted the idea of wasting space on individual quarters for some time but everyone else had been on Scorpio before its crash and they had all insisted so he had finally conceded the point. At the moment Blake’s bed was still folded away and his desk and chair occupied most of the room, along with a permanent row of drawers set into the hull space. 

The space was small enough that even Blake had to be reasonably tidy. Only his jacket was lying crumpled on the floor. Avon sat down on the chair, since one of them had to. Blake perched on the edge of the desk, in shirt sleeves and frowning at his visitor.

“Is this about the meeting today? I’m sorry but I did explain why I needed you up here.”

Avon waved a hand, dismissing the meeting. “That’s just a symptom. I’m more interested in your malady.”

“I don’t have a malady,” Blake said. “You’re going to have to be clearer than that.”

“All right. How many worst case scenarios did we run?”

“Six. You know that.”

“Five in which we both took part, then, excluding the last one where my role was limited to dying dramatically. And what did you and I do when faced with these various disasters?”

Blake shrugged. “We argued a lot. What does this have to do with anything?”

“We certainly argued a lot. But when we’d finished arguing, what did we do? Speaking generically, not in specific cases.”

Blake’s frown was deeper now, confused. “We tackled the problems, or at least tried to. Several of them were insoluble and the scenario ended up with us dead or prisoners. Why am I telling you this? Surely you remember?”

“You’ve missed the point,” Avon said. “When we’d finished arguing, we did whatever you’d decided that we’d do to tackle the problems. “

“Isn’t that what I just said?” Blake’s puzzlement seemed to be sincere.

Avon took a deep breath and counted to five before he responded. “That would be genuinely hilarious if I didn’t have to live with you. I went through hell with you six times, Blake, and it seems that you haven’t learned a damn thing about either of us from it.” He was out of the chair now. The deep breath hadn’t really helped. “I don’t want to talk to you after all. If you are going to keep on treating me as your imaginary rival instead of the bloody lapdog that we both know I am then I’m not sure that there’s any point in doing this any more.” 

As he turned his foot caught on Blake’s jacket and he looked down to disentangle himself. As the leather jerked aside he saw a clip gun on the floor. He paid it no attention at the time, being mainly concerned with getting himself out of the room before he lost his temper with Blake completely. It was afterwards, as he was cooling down with a couple of shots of spirits, that he remembered it. The clip had been purple and yellow striped, the very short range lethal electric bolt that they had barely ever used. What it was doing in Blake’s quarters he had no idea. Maybe the man was sufficiently paranoid to be prepared for mutiny. Right now Avon could believe pretty much anything of Blake.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Blake hadn’t noticed the uncovered gun. He had been so genuinely flummoxed by Avon’s outburst and his departure that he could do nothing for several minutes except rack his memory to try to figure out what had sparked the man off. Finally he had realised that Slave had doubtless recorded the whole thing and he spent the next twenty minutes replaying the conversation over several times in a search for clues. 

One reference was obvious although its significance for Avon’s temper escaped him. In each of the scenarios he and Avon had discussed what they should do and come up with a plan together but in the end he had taken the lead. There was nothing surprising about that; in the years since they’d first met Avon had never been one to issue orders. If he didn’t agree he hung back or complained but he didn’t try to take over unless the crisis demanded it. Blake couldn’t think of any reason why the simulations should be different, or why Avon should suddenly have decided that their dynamic was unacceptable. Yet there had been a great deal of anger in that spat out and utterly unfair “lapdog!” 

As for the rest of it, he was baffled. He could make nothing of the reference to his imaginary rival, or the malady that his order about Avon staying on Scorpio was supposedly a symptom of. He was sorry that Avon had been so upset but the reasons for not taking him down there had been absolutely sound. It had been time for Blake to meet these allies face to face. Avon had done all the preparation impeccably; there was no reason to risk him just so he could talk them through everything that was already fully covered in his brief. Far more sensible to keep him on the ship with Orac in case there were issues they needed to consult on. 

And that was that. Blake could get no further. He wanted to. Having Avon so furious with no good reason was unpleasant enough to wipe out the remaining glow of satisfaction from the day’s success,but it was too late now to try to sort things out, and he had no enthusiasm for re-entering that maelstrom of fury anyway. Hopefully Avon would have calmed down by morning.

Blake pressed the button to retract the desk in order to allow the bed to unfold and the gun’s light grey metal shone in the folds of his jacket on the floor. Blake picked it up without giving it any conscious thought and held it for a few seconds, letting the familiar mixture of reassurance and discomfort roll over him. Then he dropped it into its usual place in the top drawer and unfolded the bed for sleep.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“I am sorry to disturb you, master, but Master Tarrant is asking everyone to join him on the flight deck as a matter of urgency.” 

Avon swung his legs off the bed. “Is there immediate danger?”

“In my very humble opinion I do not believe so, Master.”

In that case he had time to pull his clothes on and grab his jacket. Scorpio’s crew quarters were only a couple of minute’s dash away from the control room. He could hear raised voices in front of him as he ran. 

There was Tarrant at the main console and Soolin at hers, and Blake in a night gown sliding in beside Tarrant who had shifted to let him at the controls. “What’s up?” 

“Distress call,” Tarrant said. “I think it’s the Red Poll.” 

“That’s Nuisa’s ship, isn’t it?” Blake didn’t wait for an answer. “Slave, play the message on the main screen.”

“At once, Master.” By now the rest of the crew had assembled in front of the screen. The video was blurred and the sound distorted but Avon could make out enough details to confirm Tarrant’s claim. Nuisa had been at the conference with at least a dozen soldiers and had been due to start off back to her home planet shortly after Scorpio had left. Whoever had sent the distress call was even through the distortion clearly not Nuisa. He was talking in a muffled fashion about an onboard explosion when the message cut off abruptly.

“Sabotage,” Avon said. “Or a trap for us. Either way we should tread very carefully.” 

“I wasn’t proposing to charge in without looking,” Blake said. “But it is a distress call and from one of out allies at that. Tarrant, take us to within close scan range and keep listening. I’m going to put some clothes on.” 

Ten minutes later Blake was dressed and back just as Scorpio was closing in on the Red Poll’s position. The screen showed the small ship with no obvious damage but their hails were being returned with silence. 

“Can we scan for life signs?” Blake asked the room in general. Avon knew that the man was still getting thrown occasionally by the limitations of Scorpio compared to his poor deceased Liberator. 

“No such luck,” Tarrant said. “But the weapons are offline and the shields are down, if that’s any help.”

Avon noticed something else.“The lights are off,” There were no glimmers of illumination coming from the ship.

“If life support’s down then we’re too late.” Tarrant didn’t sound particularly upset. Avon wondered, not for the first time, if the young man actually cared a jot about other people at all. 

The ship was rotating very slowly. “Tarrant, fly round it. There might be damage on the other side.” Blake commanded. “Dayna and I will get suited up.” 

“I’ll come too,” Avon said. “The most likely reason for the lights and comms to be out is that the entire power systems is trashed and they are all dead. The second most likely is that their computer system is down.” It was a genuine enough reason for him to take the risk, though he mostly wanted to find out what Blake’s response would be this time. 

“You don’t need to come,” Blake said. “I can report back if we need you.”

Avon snorted. “If you’ll let me finish. The third is that nothing is damaged and they are merely waiting to shoot us when we teleport across, in which case three of us are more likely to win a firefight than two.” 

“It would be more sensible for Soolin to come in that case.” Blake said. 

“I have successfully shot a fair number of people over the last few years,” Avon pointed out. “Mainly while you were lounging around on vacation on Gauda Prime. If you’ve got no better reason than that I’m suiting up with you.” He turned to Tarrant, Vila and Soolin. “Find us the best place to teleport onboard, assuming they are setting an ambush. Orac might be able to help with a schematic of the ship. And keep checking for external damage.” 

He glanced at Blake to see how the man was taking his orders. Avon was sufficiently annoyed to bring this whole competition thing to a head and since the Red Poll was almost certainly already empty of life they might as well get the fight over now. 

Sure enough, Blake was scowling. “Orac is your responsibility. I want you to stay here and deal with it.”

“My responsibility?” Avon let his temper show a little. “I don’t recall applying for the job of junior computer technician, and Orac is programmed to obey everyone on Scorpio. If this lot aren’t capable of extracting one simple ship schematic from it between them I suggest you ought to be shouting at them, not me. And I’m still coming with you.”

“I don’t have time to argue with you about this,” Blake snapped. “There are people possibly dying over there. You’re going to stay here and we’ll talk about it when I get back.” 

“Am I? And how are you going to make that happen?”

“By instructing everyone not to operate the teleport for you. Come on, Dayna.” And Blake strode out towards the store with the EVA suits.

“Don’t look at us like that, “ Tarrant said to Avon. “We are not taking sides.” 

“Really not our fight,” Soolin confirmed. Vila had swiftly turned his back to Avon and was sliding Orac’s key into place.

“You’re all cowards,” Avon told them with disgust. He briefly thought about getting Orac to do it but with Blake and Dayna chancing trouble he couldn’t justify kicking a human off the teleport controls to insert the rather less reliable computer instead. 

He left the other three to sort out the schematic- after all they were indeed quite capable of it- and went to find Blake, who was struggling into the rather awkward suit with the limited help of the already besuited Dayna. 

“Not now!” Blake looked exasperated on seeing him. “You can shout at me all you like when we get back, I promise. Right now I need to concentrate on what I’m doing.”

Dayna was pulling the material the wrong way. It was likely to catch in the zips. Avon stepped forward to take over. For a few minutes he said nothing put “lift your arm” and similar instructions. Finally when Blake was sealed in Avon stepped back again and started to lead the way back to the teleport. 

“I will hold you to that,” he told Blake. “You have some serious explaining to do.” 

“Do I?” Blake’s slightly muffled voice sounded puzzled. “You’d better tell me about it later.”

The group had collectively decided to put Blake and Dayna down in the furthest crew quarters. Vila claimed with his usual odd but unarguable logic that if there was an ambush it was unlikely to involve people being asleep in bed. Avon was at the teleport controls as Blake radioed back. “It’s dark, and cold. Around freezing according to the suit, but the atmosphere is good. We’re going to make our way forward now.”

“Stay in touch,” Avon had a bad feeling about this, remembering Zukan.

For the next few minutes Blake kept up a quiet monologue, describing their slow movement through the unlit passages towards the front of the ship.

“Still no-one,” he was saying. “And it’s...”

“Blake?” Avon could see from the board in front of him that the transmission had cut off. His hand had already been hovering over the teleport’s recall controls but the familiar whine told him that the system was no longer registering the bracelets.

“Tarrant! Any indication of activity on the ship? An explosion? Anything?”

“Nothing,” Tarrant said. “Still reading cold and dark.”

“Right. Soolin, take the teleport controls. “ Avon was resetting them as he spoke. “That’ll set me down where the other two materialised. If the links to the others are restored bring us all back over.” 

He seized a gun from the rack and two spare bracelets. “Tarrant, if none of us get in touch in the next half hour do your best to scare the living daylights out of whoever’s running things on that ship. Take it apart piece by piece if you have to.” Torch. He needed a torch. Avon dived for a cupboard, dragged out a heavy old fashioned flash-light and shoved it in his waistband as he stepped onto the teleport platform. “Put me down now.”

For a moment Soolin hesitated, then she slid the control. Avon materialised in the darkness, the air freezing in his lungs. 

He waited a few seconds without moving but he could hear nothing except a faint background hum that he thought must be the air supply. 

“Soolin?” he murmured quietly “Reading me?”

“Yes,” the equally quiet voice came back. 

“Good. I’m going to leave the link open. Keep silent, all of you.” 

He flicked the torch on and swept it around. Just an empty dormitory, as Blake had said. 

The next couple of compartments were also empty. Moving forward through the galley, Avon reached a closed door and hesitated. He thought he could hear voices on the other side but it was too faint to be sure, let alone to know who was speaking. 

Sweeping the light around he searched the cupboards until he’d found a glass. With that up against the door and his ear to it he could make out a little more. The voices were raised and one of them was Dayna.

“Soolin?” Avon muttered, and then “Scorpio?” Nothing. Whatever had affected Blake’s bracelet was now affecting his. He backed up slowly and found that the signal returned about twenty five feet from the closed door. 

He explained the situation briefly to Scorpio. “It’s a short range effect. One of you needs to teleport down here. Whoever it is can stay back here in constant contact with the ship while I go forward and find our missing lambs. Tarrant needs to pilot and Soolin’s competent with the teleport so that means you, Vila.”

The silence reeked of objection. His voice sharpened. “You’ll be perfectly safe. There’s absolutely no-one back here and you can be teleported back in seconds.”

“Blake didn’t say that I had to go.” Vila’s voice was resentful. “You’re not in charge.”

“Well, in Blake’s absence it’ s me or Tarrant,” Avon said. “And you don’t want to start taking your orders from Tarrant. Unless you’d rather just let Blake and Dayna die? In which case I’ll be in charge permanently and seriously annoyed with you.”

It took a few more similarly persuasive comments but Vila finally appeared next to Avon. 

“About time. Stay here. Make sure you stay in range of Scorpio and you keep watching that door.” He indicated the one in front with the torch beam. “If you see us coming through, warn Soolin so we can get teleported up without delay.”

“What if I see someone else coming?” 

It would have been too dark for Vila to see Avon’s shrug. “I’ve known you long enough not to expect any heroics. Just leave the bolting until you have a reason to run.”

He left Vila behind and strode back up the ship to the closed door. The voices on the other side had quietened. Hopefully that only meant that they had either run out of conversation or moved somewhere else. Avon considered the door without any enthusiasm. It was a large airlock- not the sort that you could open a crack and sneak through unobtrusively.

There was however a small glass section about seven foot up. He found himself something to stand on and just about managed to peer through. The window was small and the door thick so he could only see a small high up segment of the room, currently containing the top half of a head. Straight fair hair- not Dayna or Blake. 

His multi tool with a laser blade was in his pocket; Avon set to work, very quietly. Eventually he lowered the glass from his side down to the galley table and poked his head through the hole as far as the second, inside glass. His view was much better now; Blake and Dayna were tied up on the floor and there were three people guarding them. 

Two choices- he could shoot the glass out and then shoot the captors, which would be quick but make a great deal of noise, or he could remove the second piece of glass and take down the guards with the silencer clip which might enable him to get the others away without alerting whoever else was aboard. No-one was facing his direction so he set to work on the glass, thankful for the darkness on his side. 

He was nearly ready to remove it when one of the guards started to pace around the room. When the woman turned the corner she was going to be looking straight at the glowing red hot glass; she cold hardly miss it. Avon was readying himself to fire at the glass after all when Blake moved, rolling across the floor towards the other door. with Dayna quickly following suit. They were too entangled in rope to get more than a couple of feet but it distracted all three guards. As Avon reapplied the laser to the glass he could heard swearing and muffled cries. 

Now. He hit the glass with the butt of his gun and it fell outwards. Before the guards could react Avon had picked each of them off with the near silent stun. Then he dropped down and pushed open the heavy airlock door. 

The far door was still closed; apparently he hadn’t alerted anyone. “Avon!” Dayna said with relief. She looked somewhat worse for wear. Avon cut the ropes around Dayna’s legs, then sent her limping back towards Vila and turned to Blake. 

“Saw you though glass,” Blake seemed to having some trouble talking. Something was hurting badly, Avon guessed. 

“Yours was a timely distraction,” Avon said. “Of course if you’d let me come in the first place you doubtless wouldn’t have needed rescuing.”

Blake’s face had turned stiff, “Not now, Avon.” He weakly shook the ropes off and let Avon pull him to his feet, but as soon as Avon let go Blake cursed in agony as one leg gave way.

Avon wrapped an arm around Blake’s waist and helped him limp through the airlock. For a moment he remembered Blake doing the same for him in that the last simulation, but as he glanced around the far door opened and his memories were pushed aside by the urgency of the situation. He spun and shot with his free hand, pushing Blake sideways behind the airlock door for cover, then dived behind it himself as at least two people shot back. 

A glance down the ship towards the dormitory showed no lights. Dayna and Vila had probably already teleported away. Damn. Avon fired a couple of shots through the door then helped Blake to slam it closed and shoved the palm of his hand on the lock button. 

“Teleport restarts in less than 10 yards,” he told Blake. “I’ll stay here and keep the door closed, until you get away then I’ll run for it.” He frowned at Blake’s lopsided stance. No weight at all on that bad leg. “Can you make it?”

“I’m not leaving you here.” 

Avon thought he must have been misunderstood. “We both need to be down there to get off this thing. You can’t run and I can so you’ll have to go first while I keep the door closed. 

“I’ll stay with the door.” Blake said. “Give me your gun.”

“And how will you get out? Just go, Blake.”

“I’m not leaving you alone on this ship. Not even for a few seconds.”

Avon was getting the impression that whatever rationale Blake was working on here wasn’t going to be susceptible to argument. He could hear tools being used on the other side of the door. “All right. Go down there, get in touch with Scorpio, tell them to wait ten seconds before the teleport, then call back to me. I can be with you in half that time and we’ll teleport out together.”

Blake nodded, reluctantly, and dropped to his hands and his good knee, crawling along with his injured leg dragging behind as he disappeared into the darkness.. To Avon the few yards seemed to take forever, though it must have been less than a minute before Blake shouted. “Teleport in ten, Avon! Hurry!”

Avon counted ten seconds out and saw the faint shimmer of Blake’s teleport with some relief. He waited another few seconds, enough time for Soolin to register that he wasn’t with Blake and reset the teleport, then lifted his hand from the door lock and ran, firing blindly behind him as he went. As he reached the end of the field he was shouting into the bracelet,“ Teleport now!” A bolt sizzled into the ground just in front of him, just about where Blake had been on the ground. He felt the teleport start a split second before something hit him hard from behind.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If they had been on Liberator Avon would be waking up around now. 

If they had been still on his old ship Blake would be pacing around, waiting for Avon to emerge unscathed from the med unit. Instead he was sitting in the control room in a wheelchair, his leg immobilised in front of him, and when (if) Avon did wake up he would be facing weeks of discomfort as the skin grafts healed and the muscles in his shoulder recovered from the damage torn into it by that plasma bolt. 

Blake had been rather proud of his restraint on the issue of Liberator. After all, Avon had not intended to get her destroyed. There had been no point in telling the man what Blake really thought about it; she was gone and that was that. 

“Would you like another coffee?” Tarrant asked politely. Blake managed not to snort. The crew were being irritatingly solicitous now that he was stuck in this chair and Tarrant knew damn well that he was not forgiven for what had happened to Red Poll. Blake was starting to believe that he should have told the lot of them exactly what he thought of them shortly after coming aboard Scorpio and risked the desertions. Maybe then he could have established a chain of command that someone took some notice of.

“No, thank you,” he told Tarrant. “I would like those alternate courses sometime in the next ten minutes though, if you could squeeze them in between coffee breaks.”

“Leg hurting again,” Tarrant asked in an understanding tone that make Blake want to slap him.

“Just get me those courses.” Blake went back to trying to compose a message on his console about the delay to the conference. He still had no idea whether the people who had set up the Red Poll trap had been working for Nuisa (who had not after all been on board) or not, and since Tarrant had blown the ship to smithereens while Blake had been temporarily preoccupied with having his broken knee cap set the chances of Blake finding out before he had to deal with the antidote conference were extremely low. Tarrant and Avon were two of a kind; they just did what they pleased, regardless. 

He had got a few more words down and erased half of them again when Soolin came in.

“Avon’s awake” she announced. 

“How is he?” Tarrant asked before Blake could speak.

“Very weak and in quite a lot of pain. He’s refusing more painkillers- says he wants to speak to Blake first. Do you want me to take your wheelchair, Blake?”

“No,” Blake said. “Tell him to take the painkillers and get some rest.” 

“I’m sure Avon won’t mind staying awake long enough for you to say thank you for saving your life.” Tarrant’s voice was a study in light innocence.

Blake kept his own voice steady. “I’ll talk to Avon when he’s clear headed enough to give me a full explanation of his actions. Anything I might say to him now is hardly likely to aid in his recovery. How are those flight plans coming on?”

As the new few days crawled by Blake was all too aware that the crew that Avon had bequeathed him were just as unsatisfactory as the ship. Jenna and Cally would have made him talk to Avon whether he wanted to or not. The new women now just disapproved of him. Vila engaged in his usual response to stress onboard by telling bad jokes nervously and Tarrant played the smart alec rich kid, making remarks that from anyone else would have been innocent but Blake knew damn well were deliberately barbed, apparently for no better reason than the man’s own amusement. Blake got regular updates on Avon’s slow improvement but no-one suggested again that he visit so he buried himself in work instead. 

After three days of accelerated healing treatments Soolin, who had taken up the role of medic, cut the whole-leg cast off as he sat on his bed and sprayed a much lighter rubbery substance around his knee. She handed him a cane. “You won’t need the wheelchair any more.” 

“Good. Thank you,” Blake said, rather stiffly. He supposed that he had no excuse not to visit Avon now. Maybe he’d just finish the report he was reading first.

An hour later he limped down towards the control room. He wanted a word with Tarrant about a couple of things that had come up. Then he’d visit Avon.

Avon was already there. Wrapped up in blankets in Blake’s wheelchair and placed in front of Blake’s specially lowered console, he was dictating something to Orac in a slower and more hesitant voice than usual, barely above a whisper. He looked up at the tap of the cane and dark eyes in a too-white face met Blake’s. 

Blake was shocked at how bad he looked. “You should still be in bed.” Blake was going to have extremely sharp words with whoever had brought him here and left him alone in the room. 

“Where you could continue to ignore me?” What Avon’s voice lacked in strength it made up for in bite. 

“I didn’t want to agitate you while you were so ill. And you’re clearly still too unwell to be here.”

“Clearly not, since here I am.”

“I’m not having you put your recovery at risk just to aggravate me.” Blake moved around to the back of the wheelchair. “You’re going to go back to your room and stay there until you can walk back here under your own steam without collapsing.” 

“Wheelchairs are just for the elite?” 

“I only had a fractured knee cap. I didn’t almost die.” He tried to push the chair but the brakes were engaged and his knee protested the effort sharply. 

“I’m not going anywhere until you make good on your promise,” Avon said.

“What promise?” 

“You said that I could shout at you all I liked when you got back.”

Had he really? Avon didn’t sound capable of raising his voice past this weak whisper let alone shouting. Blake gave up on moving and came round to take a seat next to Avon. “I don’t know what you think you’ve got to shout at me about. If you’d stayed on the ship as I expressly ordered you to then you wouldn’t have been shot in the back.” 

“I stayed on the damn ship until you got yourself captured. After that I used some initiative. Don’t bother thanking me- I’m sure you’d have managed to untie yourselves and overpower three armed guards perfectly well on your own.”

“You could have sent Tarrant or Soolin.”

Avon’s eyes had got darker at that. “Is that what you would have done, if I’d gone missing? Send in the expendable kids and hope they didn’t screw up?”

“No, “ Blake admitted. “But it’s not the same. You could have been killed by that bolt.”

“It used to be the same” Avon said tiredly. “Why did I become the one you always want to leave behind? I don’t want your bloody command, if that’s what you think.”

“I’ve never thought that!” Blake had seen the relief with which Avon had handed over Scorpio and her awkward crew. “You just...it feels like you’re trying to get yourself killed regardless of what I try to do to keep you in one piece. You could have teleported off Red Poll with me as you said you would. Instead you had to stay behind and get shot.”

“Staying behind was no more dangerous for me and a lot less so for you. You ought to be able to see that. Orac agrees with me that you are being more illogical and emotional than usual but I’ll be damned if I can see why!” Avon’s raised voice dissolved in a fit of coughing which didn’t stop.

Blake panicked. “Soolin!” he shouted. “Slave, get Soolin here now” He had dropped to knee by the chair, almost oblivious to the agonising pain in his bent knee. “Keep breathing, Avon!”

“I am breathing,” Avon gasped out between coughs. 

Soolin raced in, and jerked up Avon’s sleeve to look at the monitor around his forearm. She sat back on her heels. “You’re perfectly all right, “ she told Avon. “It’s just a cough.” 

“I know that,” Avon managed to get out. “What’s wrong with Blake?”

Blake was fighting for breath, his heart pounding. “Heart attack” he gasped.

Soolin slid the monitor off Avon’s arm and wrapped it around Blake’s. “Not according to this,” she said. “Your adrenaline’s spiking, that’s all. Breathe slower and get up off that knee.” She helped him back up to a chair. “You need painkillers and a mild sedative. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” 

“You could get me a glass of water as well,” Avon said, between coughs.

By the time Soolin had returned Blake was feeling slightly better, enough so to feel moderately embarrassed. He took the analgesic but refused the sedative. Avon sipped his water and watched Blake like a man waiting to say something, while Blake counted his slow breaths and tried to act as if a panic attack on the flight deck was nothing out of the ordinary. He saw the look that Avon gave Soolin and her subsequent departure. Avon was determined to continue to talk to him alone, then. 

Eventually Blake stopped feeling as if he were about to faint. Avon’s cough had subsided. The silence extended a little further than was comfortable before Avon broke it. 

“It must have been a shock when Jenna died,” he said.

Blake blinked at the change in topic. “Of course it was.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t have much time and we couldn’t recover her body, so we had a short wake, said goodbye, distributed her possessions among those who had been closest to her.”

“And then?” Avon asked.

“We were under a lot of pressure. We had to get back to work.“

Avon nodded. “ I saw Cally’s body,” he said, “but I didn’t have time even to stop, then or later. By the time Servalan’s traps had been sprung we had nothing left of her at all.” 

“I’m sorry,” Blake said soberly. “That must have been hard.”

“So,” Avon said. “It’s not death in general that’s scaring you witless. Just my death.”

“You’re not going to die.” Blake was harsh.

“Why not?” Avon demanded. “It’s not as if we don’t all live precariously. On the ship, off the ship, someone’s always trying to kill us. Our odds are always slim. Why should my chances be any different from Tarrant’s, or yours? Or Cally’s?” 

“Stop this,” Blake said. His heart was racing again. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do but you’re not going to die. Now shut up about it, please.”

Avon was considering him. “What happened, in that last worst case scenario? What happened after I died?”

“You didn’t die, “ Blake insisted. “It wasn’t real.”

“What happened after I apparently died?”

Blake found himself looking at the blank main screen. “Nothing happened. I tried to resuscitate you but I couldn’t.” He could feel the memory of the dead weight of the man in his arms, the exhaustion from the failed CPR. “Then Tarrant turned up and woke you up again.”

“And that’s what Tarrant will say when I ask him, is it. That’s what Orac’s reconstruction will show me? Nothing at all happened?”

Blake glared at him. “Don’t push this, Avon.” The gun had been smooth and solid in his hand, the dull relief of knowing that he didn’t have to go on, that he didn’t need to move Avon’s body, already limp and cold, from his lap, and do something with it and then keep on going alone. “It was a simulation and not even a good one. We must have known that subconsciously. What happened wasn’t a reliable predictor of reality.”

“What did happen?” Avon insisted. “That scenario had been intended to show us how you’d function on your own, when everyone else was dead but the elapsed simulation time when I was woken up was less than half an hour or so after I died. What triggered the end of the simulation, Blake? What made Tarrant turn up so soon?”

“It didn’t work,” Blake snapped. “It was too extreme, too far fetched. There wasn’t anything useful to learn from it. That’s why I stopped the simulations.” 

“I don’t particularly want to make Tarrant tell me,” Avon said, his voice dropping even quieter. “Or order Orac to show me. But it seems that I do need to know. What happened, Blake?” 

Blake felt a sudden wash of fury. Couldn’t the man let it go? 

“I tried to kill myself, “ he snarled. “But it wasn’t real. It was set up. We’d set it up, you and I. We’d pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and we finally pushed too far. Now I know what it feels like to have you die and to want to die myself and I can’t just forget it again. It feels like every time I close my eyes I remember your lifeless body and how that damn gun was the only escape from it.”

There was silence for a moment, then Avon sighed. “I wish you’d told me that a month ago. You seemed calm enough when I woke up.”

“I was numb,” Blake said. “I think I was waiting for Tarrant to let me alone so I could finish it. I’d rather not have witnesses if I’m going to blow my brains out. It seems undignified.”

Avon half smiled at that. “Believe me, it would be just as undignified to use an electric bolt clip in your cabin, Blake. You of all people should know that memories aren’t inviolable. You can’t wrap me in cotton wool. This needs fixing.” 

Blake shook his head. “Fixing how? It’s not as if I was told a lie. I just don’t know how to live with knowing the truth.” 

Avon’s eyes were dark again. “ It might take a while but I should be able to find something that will help. For now stop keeping that gun in your room. If you need the comfort of oblivion there are plenty of recreational drugs on board with considerably less permanent effects.”

Blake nodded, too mortified to speak. How had Avon even known about the gun? 

“Good, How’s the conference planning going?”

“It would be better if we had any idea whether Nuisa could be trusted or not,” Blake said, relieved at the change of topic. 

“Can we sideline her? Her planet’s contributing a couple of the chemicals but we might be able to get them elsewhere.” 

“I’ll look into it, “ Blake frowned at Avon’s half closed eyes. “Get some rest now, please. Nothing’s going to happen without you.” 

Avon nodded. According to Soolin who took the wheelchair back to Avon’s room he was asleep before he got there. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” Avon demanded.

Orac hummed stubbornly. “You have set me a task. Do you want me to carry it out or not?” 

“I just don’t trust you to get human psychology right on your own,” Avon told it. “It was the simulator that caused this problem. If you’d only tell me how you intend to cure Blake then I could apply my judgement to stop you making any serious mistakes.

“I cannot tell you,” Orac said, “because your natural responses are an integral part of the solution. If you reached a conclusion beforehand about how you ought to react in the scenario then it would be impossible to completely block that knowledge when suppressing your memories.” 

“And what if my natural reactions are unhelpful?” Avon demanded. “We could make him worse, God help us.” 

“I have sufficient data from the subliminal testing to confidently predict your reactions in most situations. ” Orac said smugly.

Avon had been unimpressed by the tests that Orac had run on both him and Blake, mainly because Orac had refused to divulge any information about the results. They had both been wired up from head to toe and shown interminable quantities of images too fast to be processed consciously. Blake had said that it had left him feeling heavily nauseous. Avon had just felt unsettled at the idea that Orac might now know more about what was going on in his head that he did. When this was done he was going to insist that Orac wipe those files, under threat of disassembly if necessary.

He glared at Orac. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see if I can persuade Blake to recover the simulators. I doubt if he’ll be any keener on the idea than I am.” 

“I could predict precisely how long he will object for before agreeing,” Orac said, “but conveying this information to you would change your behaviour in such a way that the prediction would no longer be valid.”

“I understand the concept of a self defeating prophecy perfectly well, thank you.” Avon said. “I am merely telling you that if you screw this up you are going to be in a great deal of trouble.” He seized his walking frame and stalked as well as he could manage out on Orac’s errand. 

 

The water was salty and slightly chilled. Avon swam a few more strokes then flipped over to float on his back. Two pale suns lit up the blue sky, their warmth already chasing the chill from his wet stomach and thighs. A flock of shining birds swooped low over the water then dived below the surface to become jewelled fish. 

He moved around for a view of the shore. On the white sand a figure was moving towards the sea from the green of the jungle edge. The naked man stood at the water’s edge waving his arms over his head. Avon flipped over again and started to swim towards the shore with strong, definite strokes. A few feet from land he stood up and waded through the shallow water. There were two fresh fish on the fire and fruit piled next to it; he was suddenly and ravenously hungry. 

“Good swim?” Blake asked, sliding the fish onto a wide leaf for him.

“Good,” he agreed. Swimming here was always pleasant but this one seemed particularly invigorating. “I see you still haven’t invented cutlery.” 

“Eat with your fingers,” Blake said cheerfully, sitting down on the sand with his fish. Avon sprawled across his lap to pick at his, hissing a little as his fingers got burnt. As his weight settled firmly across Blake’s thighs the man seemed to tense behind him. Avon glanced up.

“Something wrong?”

“Someone must be walking on my grave, “ Blake said and bent down to kiss his forehead. “You taste of salt. Goes well with the fish.” He stated to lick Avon’s face. 

“I’m eating,” Avon complained, more because he felt he should than because he objected to the warm tongue. “Can’t you wait five minutes?”

“No,” Blake said, in a tone of mild surprise. “No, apparently I can’t. I can’t think about anything but screwing you right now.” He must have put down his plate because both his hands were roaming across Avon’s body. Avon could feel the hardness of Blake’s erection against the small of his own back. He was rapidly losing interest in his own food but he took another couple of bites for the principle of the thing. 

Blake was biting him around the neck now, not hard but impatiently. “You taste amazing,” he said. “You feel amazing too, as if it’s the first time I’ve touched you.” 

Avon didn’t bother pointing out that they’d been fucking pretty much non stop for the whole two weeks they’d been here because he understood what Blake meant. Right now the man’s touch did feel parrticularly intense. Maybe there was something in the fish. He pushed the leaf with his half eaten meal aside on the sand and twisted round to kiss Blake properly. 

 

As the second sun turned purple through the sunset haze, they lay together on the sand. Avon was looking up at the darkening sky while Blake’s fingers brushed lightly over his chest. 

“Credit for your thoughts,” Blake said. 

“I was wondering why we’d never done this before,” Avon said.

“We’re making up for it now,” Blake pointed out. “At least when you aren’t insisting on going swimming instead.” 

“I’ve told you, three times a day is my limit,” Avon said. “More than that is just decadence, not to mention slightly painful. But back to my point. There were years when we could have been sleeping together and neither of us made a move, but we come down here for a perfectly innocent break and within a couple of hours we’re shagging all over the beach like old hands. I’m trying to figure out what changed.” 

He was struggling to even remember whose idea the holiday had been. It didn’t matter, he supposed. Here they were, warm and close and quite possibly going to fuck each other again before sleeping despite his stated three times a day limit.

“Maybe we changed,” Blake said. His hand ran down to run across Avon’s groin. “Maybe we accidentally dropped our guards just long enough to see what we were missing. I think I’ve wanted to be close to you for a very long time indeed. I just didn’t let myself think about it.” 

Avon thought that that required some sort of equivalent declaration. While he was thinking about what that might be he saw a flash in the sky and a shining dot travelling out of the setting sun towards the darker sky.

“Look,” he said. 

“Damn,” Blake said lazily, “Where did we leave the bracelets?”

“We could just stay here,” Avon said, without moving. “Tell Tarrant he can have the ship as long as he takes it somewhere else.” 

Blake seemed to be contemplating that for a moment, then he sighed. “I don’t think a beach would suit either of us in the long term. And why should Tarrant get Scorpio anyway?”

“Dayna’s too young, Soolin’s too detached and Vila’s too much of a coward,” Avon said. “Tarrant’s just irritating, and if we were down here he wouldn’t be irritating us.” 

He stretched and rolled onto his feet. “ I suppose I’d better talk to him. Shall I persuade him we need another day?” 

“We don’t actually have to stop screwing just because we’re back on Scorpio, “ Blake pointed out. “We’ll just have to do some real work in between.” 

“True,” That cheered Avon up. He found the bracelets at the back of their small pile of belongings. “Avon to Scorpio, come in.” 

“Ready to teleport up?” Tarrant’s voice asked.

“Five minutes,” Avon said. He walked back to kiss Blake. “Not too much inbetween.”

Tarrant’s voice came through again as they’d collected up what little they’d brought and nearly at the last minute remembered to put some clothes on. “Are you listening carefully?”

“What now?" Blake sounded a little peeved.

“Listen. You have not been on a planet at all. You have been holidaying via the simulator. When we teleport you up you will each find yourselves in a simulator unit. Push open the release button and you’ll be home. Have a good trip. Teleporting now.”

The whine of the teleport started, and Avon found himself lying in the tepid simulator gel. A large button marked RELEASE flashed in front of him and he pressed it, sat up and looked around. He was in the front hold, exactly where he remembered entering the simulator some indeterminate time before. Blake’s head had just emerged from the other pod. 

They looked at each other, absolutely expressionless. Then Avon pushed himself out of the gel and gabbed the gown next to him. “Tarrant!” he shouted, loud enough to reach the other end of the ship. 

Tarrant stuck his head around the door. He looked a little cautious. “Everything all right?” 

“Where is Orac?” Avon said in a voice that was nowhere near as calm as he was aiming at. The computer had been plugged into the simulator unit when they’d stated the simulation. It was no longer there. 

“Ah,” Tarrant said. “Orac’s in hiding.” 

“Why?” Blake said from beside him.

“Because it knows that I’m going to rip it apart down to the nanomolecular level as soon as I find it.” Avon snarled. “Where is it, Tarrant? It can’t move, so you must have hidden it.” 

“It’s missing. It left a message for you,” Tarrant said cheerfully. “Would you like to hear it?”

“No!” Avon hissed.

“I suppose we’d better,” Blake said. If he was as angry as Avon he was hiding it remarkably well. Tarrant held up a small recorder.

“I have fulfilled the task set me precisely and with a great deal of flair,” Orac’s voice came out. “Nonetheless my research on individual emotional patterns suggests that Kerr Avon will not accept the logical necessity of my actions. To avoid his predictably dangerous reaction I will be going into hiding until these matters are further resolved ” 

“It does seem to have you nailed on that one, “ Blake said calmly.

“I note that it didn’t say that you would be furious!” Avon turned on him. “Are you telling me that you’re just fine with this?”

Blake looked back at him without flinching. “I’d like to think about what’s happened first before I decide how I feel. Maybe you and I should talk about it.”

Avon found it easy to transmit a little of his anger from the absent computer to the accessible man. “Maybe you just got what you wanted!”

“Maybe I did, “ Blake snapped back at him. “Maybe you did too. Maybe you should think about that before blaming everybody but yourself for everything you did!” 

Avon pulled himself together. Shouting wouldn’t help. “I hope it fixes your nightmares, anyway, “ he said coldly. “You can take your pick now. One set of fake memories for another.” He stalked out of the room and shut himself in his quarters. 

The predictable knock came all too soon. Avon let Blake open the door and come in. 

“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “It was an unacceptable thing to do to you. I should have been angrier on your behalf.” 

“Why my behalf? “ Avon said dully. “Why not yours? Orac implanted false memories of us having sex to lure us into making love for the first time without even knowing that’s what we were doing. How is that all right with you?”

“Orac didn’t trick me into doing anything I didn’t want to do,” Blake said. “It just confused the order of events. I guess that’s not the case for you.” 

Avon thought about that for a moment. He had, undoubtedly, enjoyed sex with Blake. He still wanted more. Just having the man here, close in the tiny room, made it almost impossible not to remember how good it had been. He wanted to have made the choice, though and he’d wanted to have Blake choose him, not just falsely recall something that had never happened and go along with it.

“It could have been anyone,” he said. “What if Orac had made me believe that I’d been screwing Tarrant instead? Would it have been able to stick him and I on a simulated beach instead and watch us fuck like a couple of porn stars?”

“It didn’t.” Blake said firmly. “I quite agree that the technology is open to all sorts of horrendous abuses, of which my merely having to imagine you and Tarrant fucking like porn stars is definitely one of the worse, but Orac wasn’t doing whatever it chose. It was following your orders to find some way to deal with my trauma and it was bound by its standing instructions not to unnecessarily harm Scorpio’s crew. I would like to think that it would not have pushed us together if that’s not where it had calculated we belonged.” He looked over at Avon a little desperately. “I still think that’s where we belong, by the way, however we got there. But if you don’t, I have to respect that.”

Avon walked to the door and held it open for Blake. “You need to go and find out what your ship and your crew have been doing in our pretend absence. I need to calm down enough that I can think about something other than taking that bloody computer apart component by component. I’ll see you in the morning.”

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Orac had certainly managed to distract Blake from his obsession with the memory of Avon’s dead body. Now he lay in bed aching for the live one.

Blake understood Avon’s anger but he couldn’t bring himself to share it. You knew when you entered a simulation that it was going to be a ruse of some sort designed to trick you into feeling something that you wouldn’t otherwise. You agreed to that. It was a dangerous thing to do- the despair and grief of the worst case scenario had almost overwhelmed him- but you could find good emotions in there as well. Without the simulator and Orac’s prying he might have gone on for yet more years suppressing his feelings. So might Avon. 

The difference was that he welcomed the chance to be able to act on how he felt, while Avon felt manipulated and exposed. Blake didn’t know what to do about that. He couldn’t afford to let Avon destroy Orac to soothe his wounded pride and from the fact that Avon hadn’t yet taken the ship apart to find the treacherous box he presumed that the other man knew that wasn’t really an option either. 

How could he allow Avon his right to be furious that it had happened at all while simultaneously trying to persuade him that it had been good enough to continue? Blake was no close to an answer in the early hours of the morning than he had been when he’d lain down to chase sleep. 

He must have slept finally because when his lights went on he definitely woke up. “Very fetching.” Avon nodded at his night gown. 

“Thank you.” Blake sat up in bed and glanced at the clock. Still solidly night shift. “Is this just a conversation or is something happening that I should know about?”

“Just a conversation,” Avon said, sitting down on the end of his bed. He was wearing loose black silk tunic and leggings, nothing Blake had seen before. “I thought you probably wouldn’t mind too much. I could have been wrong.”

“You’re welcome in my room any time,” Blake said lightly. “Even if it’s just to shout.”

“I’m over the shouting for now, though Tarrant would be wise to keep out of my way for a day or so.” 

Blake thought it was wiser not to ask after his intentions towards Orac. “What are we conversing about?”

“About the nature of reality.” Avon settled back and crossed his legs. 

Blake found it necessary to shift under the bedclothes slightly to stop his erection being quite so obvious. “Just light chatter, then. Go on. I’m all ears.” 

“Not quite all of you,” Avon glanced down the bed. “All right. My false memories suggest that we had sex nearly two dozen times. Of those I only have any substantial recollection of the last three. Does that match your memories?”

Blake nodded. “The earlier ones were just implanted background impressions with no detail, like the memories of the failed revolution were. That matches the timing- we were in the simulators for about twelve hours. So,” he managed a smile at Avon. “We seem to agree that we’ve had sex three times. It’s probably a good thing to agree on.” 

“But I don’t agree, “ Avon overrode him with obvious satisfaction. “We haven’t had sex at all. I haven’t so much as kissed you.” 

Blake thought about that for a moment. “Gel tanks don’t count?”

“They most certainly do not count, no.” 

“We definitely thought we were doing it at the time,” Blake pointed out.

“So what? You and I both thought I was dying but it didn’t make it real.” 

“All right,” Blake conceded. “So if we haven’t had sex, despite some extremely vivid memories of doing just that, what does that mean?”

“It means that we still face a choice,” Avon said. “Our memories aren’t reliable. Despite impressions to the contrary we’ve never been at this particular crossroads before. We’re not choosing to carry on what that bloody machine has started for us. We’re choosing to start something of our own. Or not, of course.”

“My choice is simple, “ Blake said, “Given how mind-blowing not having sex with you was, I’m not going to turn down a chance at the real thing. Also I think we’ll make an extraordinary partnership. In many ways we already do.”

Avon nodded thoughtfully. “I tend to concur, “ he said. “All we need to do now is to find somewhere on this damn ship with a big enough bed for the two of us.” 

“Always the pragmatist. This one will have to do for now,” Blake said, pulling back the covers on the narrow bunk. “Do you want to go on top or underneath?”

 

The simulator had got the various tastes of Avon slightly wrong. The real ones were sharper, more distinctive. Altogether better, Blake thought. It turned out that both of them still had aches and twinges from their injuries that the simulation hadn't triggered but that the actual physical effort of real sex tended to aggravate. Apart from that Blake couldn’t honestly tell the difference between the two experiences most of the time but he kept that thought to himself. To him it had felt like loving Avon either way.

He couldn’t however resist pointing out to Avon, afterwards, that their real life liaison has undoubtedly been what Orac had referred to as “matters being further resolved,” and that the computer would probably now feel it safe to make a suitably smug reappearance. Avon had sprawled on his back with his eyes closed and one arm around Blake’s shoulders (they had moved to the floor long before this point, the bed being entirely inadequate) and had treated him to a long and remarkably imaginative description of how a sentient computer might be afflicted with various torments. Since none of them seemed to be remotely feasible, Blake concluded that Orac would probably suffer nothing but the sharpest edge of Avon’s tongue, doubtless well deserved. 

He rolled over to curl against Avon. “When you've finished being brutal to Orac I’m going to enjoy watching you be very nice to Tarrant.”

“Why would I want to be nice to Tarrant?” Avon sounded suitably suspicious.

“Because he’s got the next cabin. If we take that wall out we can just about fit a double bed in, but you’ll have to persuade him to swap quarters with you first. I suggest you start complimenting his flying, unless you’d rather admire his dress sense or listen in rapt admiration to his Academy stories.” 

“Horrible thoughts,” Avon said. “I’ll have to come up with something to blackmail or bribe him with. I don’t do nice.” He ran a light hand down Blake’s hip.

“”Of course you don’t,” Blake agreed. “But we do want that bed.” 

“Leave that to me, “ Avon said. “You are still an amateur when it comes to Scorpio’s crew.”

“Ah, but I’m learning all the time.” He didn’t need a simulator to help him do it. That machine was going off his ship at the first available opportunity. Reality was quite enough trouble and enough reward for now.

 

THE END


End file.
